Contact: Dominik Gerst 

Project at the Centre:

‘The future is plant-based.’ On the collaborative production of nutritional knowledge in the context of socio-ecological transformation

Diagnoses of a progressive climate catastrophe motivate discussions about sustainable, socially and ecologically compatible diets. A plant-based diet plays a key role here. The normatively framed transition process towards a sustainable, plant-based diet can be seen as a comprehensive cultural change that goes hand in hand with a transformation of socially shared nutritional knowledge, both in terms of its forms and content. From a sociological perspective, the planned project focuses on situations in which alternative nutritional knowledge is emerging and assumes that collaborative communicative processes can be observed here. For example, we can ask: How do NGOs gather arguments for a transformation of the food system? How do nutritionists in laboratories generate knowledge about plant-based nutrient compositions? How do creative departments at food companies refine recipes for plant-based “substitute products”? How is knowledge about vegan restaurants, new recipe ideas, or shopping opportunities in supermarkets gathered and processed by vegan influencers? The aim of the project is to empirically understand how the socio-ecological transformation is reflected in plant-based nutritional knowledge and, accordingly, in a change in social nutrition communication.

Research interests:

• Sociology of food and nutrition, contemporary forms of nutrition communication
• Border research
• Digital communication
• Methods and methodologies of qualitative social research
• Social and cultural theories (practice theory, ethnomethodology, poststructuralism)